Last Serving Victoria Cross Holder, A Gurkha, Retires

Last Serving Victoria Cross Holder, A Gurkha, Retires

Mar. 25, 1985

LONDON (AP) _ Capt. Rambahadur Limbu, a Nepalese Gurkha who is the last serving holder of the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest award for courage, retires today after 28 years of service.

Limbu's regiment, the 10th Princess Mary's Own Gurkha Rifles, was saying goodbye to the officer with a curry lunch at his barracks near Aldershot. His retirement tonight will mark the first time in 129 years that the British army has been without a Victoria Cross holder.

The British Army captain, 45, says he plans to fly home and start a new life as a farmer and tour guide in the mountains around his home in Damak village, East Nepal.

The Nepalese Gurkhas have been enlisting in the British Army for 170 years. The Nepalese hill tribesmen and the British first encountered each other while fighting on opposite sides in northern India in 1815.

There were 200,000 Gurkhas in the British Army in the two world wars and 44,000 of them were killed or wounded. Their motto is ''It's better to die than be a coward'' and they are reputed to be among the world's toughest and most feared fighting men.

Their trademark is the razor-sharp, curved kukri knife. In the 1982 Falklands conflict, they were accused by Argentine officials of beheading enemy wounded and dead.The charge was indignantly denied by the British Defense Ministry.

Limbu won his Victoria Cross on Nov. 21, 1965, as a lance corporal serving in Sarawak, Malaysia, against Indonesian irregulars.He carried two wounded men to safety under machine-gun fire and then knocked out the enemy patrol.

Since Limbu won his medal, the Victoria Cross was awarded only four times more, to two Australians who served in Vietnam and posthumously to two Britons for bravery in the Falklands.